On September 1, the Florida Secretary of State posted the November 2020 candidate list. Here is a link. It includes seven presidential candidates, including Gloria La Riva, the presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. This is somewhat surprising, because the PSL did not win injunctive relief last month in its ballot access lawsuit.
On September 1, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl, a Clinton appointee, refused to enjoin the new, more severe definition of a qualified party that was created in New York in April 2020. The old vote test was that a group had to poll 50,000 vote for Governor. The new test, effective in November 2020, is that it must poll the greater of 2% or 130,000 votes for the office at the top of the ballot, every two years. This means President this year and Governor in 2022. SAM Party v Kosinski, s.d., 1:20cv-323. Here is the 44-page opinion.
The opinion does not consider the constitutionality of the new statewide petition requirement, which was raised this year from 15,000 to 45,000 signatures. Footnote one says that issue is not before the court.
The opinion relies on precedents that are not directly relevant to New York. All of the precedents cited are from states in which, if a party failed to meet the vote test, there was a method for it to regain its party status before the next election. These precedents are from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and North Carolina, all of which have a party petition that can be carried out in an odd year as well as an even year. Judge Koetl didn’t seem to grasp the point that New York is one of only eleven states that lacks any such procedure. He also relies on Jenness v Fortson, the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the Georgia 5% petition for the nominees of unqualified parties. At the time, Georgia also defined a party as a group that had polled 20%. Although the U.S. Supreme Court mentioned the 20%, that was not part of the Jenness lawsuit. The Socialist Workers Party, which brought Jenness, did not mention the 20% vote test in any of its pleadings, so anything the U.S. Supreme Court said in Jenness about Georgia’s party definition was dicta.
Most frustrating about the decision is the list of state interests for the new vote test. The opinion says on pages 32ff that the chief state interest is the new public financing system, and the desire not to spend government resources on minor party candidates who might have weak voter appeal. But then footnote 9 on page 39 admits that, under a Second Circuit opinion, states don’t need to provide public funding for all candidates on the ballot. This footnote undercuts the whole rationale for the new vote test. The only other state interests cited are the usual boilerplate arguments about keeping candidates off the ballot if they lack a modicum of voter support.
The plaintiffs are the SAM Party and the Working Families Party. The SAM Party objects to the new vote test because it says it doesn’t want to run a presidential candidate, so will be dumped off the ballot for certain in November 2020. The judge merely says that the SAM Party has no good reason not to run a presidential candidate. Of course it is up to the party, not the government, to make a decision like that.
Finally, page 42 says the issue of injunctive relief at this point is premature, as applied to the Working Families Party, because it might meet the vote test in November 2020.
On September 1, two of Kanye West’s presidential elector candidates in Virginia sued the Virginia State Board of Elections, arguing they were tricked into signing up as presidential elector candidates for West. The lawsuit is in Circuit Court, Richmond City, Wilson v Virginia State Board of Elections.
Under El-Amin v State Board of Elections, independent candidates in Virginia have a constitutional right to resign from the ticket and be replaced. 721 F.Supp.770 (e.d., 1989). Thus it seems the more logical approach would be for the electors to simply resign as electors, and let the West campaign replace them. Electors must sign a declaration of candidacy that is notarized, but the complaint says that the notary did not notarize the declarations in front of them. Furthermore the notary was herself one of the candidates for elector, and the Virginia law on notaries does not permit notaries to notarize documents in which they themselves have an interest.
On September 1, the Alaska Green Party nominated Jesse Ventura for President and Cynthia McKinney for Vice-President. The Green Party is not ballot-qualified generally in Alaska, but earlier this year it completed the petition to give it “limited Political Party” status. A “limited political party” in Alaska is ballot-qualified for president, but nothing else. Thanks to Tim San Souci for this news. See this story.
Ventura did not ask for this nomination, but he did indicate some interest earlier this year in being the presidential nominee of the Green Party, and he received a handful of votes at the party’s July 2020 convention, even though he had not been placed in nomination.
On September 3, the Maine Supreme Court will hear Jones v Dunlap, CUM-20-227. This is the case over whether the Republican Party-backed referendum petition has enough valid signatures. The lower state court had ruled that it does have enough valid signatures. If the State Supreme Court reverses the lower court, then Maine voters will use ranked choice voting for president in November.
